Life's Mystery.

[Thornton (William Thomas)]

Life's Mystery.

Description: bound in preceding text a bifolium printed on grey paper: 'Auxiliary Hints. [With "Life's Mystery."]', this with a correction and footnote (presumably by the author, see below), pp. 16, crown 8vo, the pamphlet sometime bound within a larger volume but now extracted, retaining original wrappers, with some residue along spine, the front cover partially split along upper joint, fair

Publication Details: Philadelphia, PA: Henry Longstreth, 1873

Notes: Presumably the author's own copy, with his notes on manuscript sheets tipped to each inside cover. The main text is a meditation, in verse, on the existence of Evil, extracted from the author's 'Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics' published by Macmillan in the same year, but a scarcer proposition than the larger work; scarcer still is the unrecorded leaflet of 'Auxiliary Hints', which grapples with the subject in prose, as does the first of the two manuscript sheets, which has towards its close a reference to J.S. Mill's 'Autobiography'. Thornton is better-remembered for his as...morePresumably the author's own copy, with his notes on manuscript sheets tipped to each inside cover. The main text is a meditation, in verse, on the existence of Evil, extracted from the author's 'Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics' published by Macmillan in the same year, but a scarcer proposition than the larger work; scarcer still is the unrecorded leaflet of 'Auxiliary Hints', which grapples with the subject in prose, as does the first of the two manuscript sheets, which has towards its close a reference to J.S. Mill's 'Autobiography'. Thornton is better-remembered for his association with Mill and his work in economics than he is for his poetry. The second sheet explains a lacuna in this printing of the text, where an ellipsis represents a 'sentence omitted' from the original 'not because of intrinsic unfitness but because it might to some readers seem pretentious and inconsistent with the condescending modesty which afterward claims credit only for guessing at truth' – transcribing beneath the passage, which does give a more ecstatic flavour to the author's attempt to understand the relation between divine goodness and evil. HIDE